787 DELAY: The full extent of Boeing's 787 production delay became apparent Jan. 16 when the company acknowledged first flight has slipped from the end of March to around the end of June. Boeing 787 Vice President and General Manager Pat Shanahan said delay of the initial 787 was caused by the continuing crunch of dealing with "traveled" - or out of sequence - work from the partner suppliers, as well as problems associated with matching production records and processes.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - South African aerospace manufacturer Denel is in talks with Embraer and AgustaWestland about providing fixed-wing and rotary strategic support for Denel's main manufacturing site. Shaun Liebenberg, Denel chief executive officer, confirmed the company is considering the possibility of becoming a risk-sharing partner on Embraer's proposed EMB C-390 tactical airlifter. This would build on the work the company is undertaking on the Airbus A400M program.
LSI CURBED: Defense acquisition regulators have started instituting a new restriction on lead-systems integrators (LSIs) from the fiscal 2007 defense authorization act. According to a notice in the Federal Register, the interim rule implements Section 807 of the October 2006 law, which provides that, with certain exceptions, no LSI in the acquisition of a major system by the Defense Department may have any direct financial interest in the development or construction of any individual system or element of any system of systems.
Raytheon and the U.S. Navy have completed a series of wind tunnel tests of the company's Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) Block 2 at the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Conducted during a four-and-a-half week span in the summer of 2007, the exercise collected more than 500 gigabytes of aerodynamic data during 164 wind tunnel test hours, Raytheon announced Jan. 14.
PARIS - Airbus insists flight-testing of the first A400M will still take place in the summer, but its engine will likely not have been certified at that point. Flight-testing of the TP400 engine has slipped a few weeks to rebuild parts. That shouldn't significantly delay first flight of the A400M airlifter in July or shortly after, but it does mean engine certification will not be in hand, says Airbus Executive Vice President for Programs Tom Williams.
The U.S. Army's top general reiterated Jan. 16 that the service will not be back to health until roughly the end of the next presidential administration, due to prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other demands like re-equipping, modernizing, growing the force, and ever-increasing budget pressures. Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, told an Army trade association near Washington Jan. 16 that the armed service will not regain the desired level of balanced, robust capabilities until about four years from now.
U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen made his case for establishing a coherent U.S. policy in the Arctic in the face of melting ice and Russian encroachment on the territory during a Jan. 16 speech.
BETTER VISION: ITT Corp. said Jan. 16 that its night vision business received a potentially $174.7 million order from the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command Acquisition Center. The order is for the AN/PVS-14 night vision monocular units and spare image tubes and is the latest under ITT's Omnibus VII contract first awarded in September 2005. The AN/PVS-14 allows users to adjust the gain control in varying light conditions in both urban and rural settings, ITT said. They can be handheld, head- or weapon-mounted, or fitted to a camera.
MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, Huntsville, Ala. - NASA engineers believe they have duplicated the failure mechanism that has plagued the space shuttle program with sporadic bad readings on engine cutoff (ECO) sensors in the orbiter's external tank. The failure produced an intermittent open circuit in the pass-through connector that draws information from ECO sensors in the shuttle's liquid hydrogen tank.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead says that both the number and mix of ships in the U.S. Navy fleet are integral to the success of the newly proposed maritime strategy, which has been greeted with skepticism and outright criticism on Capitol Hill. "In the past year, we've had a net gain of two ships in the Navy," Roughead told a packed room Jan. 15 at the 20th National Surface Navy Association symposium in Arlington, Va. "The question you need to ask yourself is why."
PARIS - International Launch Services (ILS) says it is building a second processing facility at its launch site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to enable two Proton M launch campaigns to be run simultaneously. The move parallels steps being taken at archrival Arianespace to meet tight demand.
LAW OF WAR: The Pentagon has begun proposing amended regulations requiring Defense Department contractors to institute "effective" programs for preventing violations of laws of war by contractor personnel working with and for the U.S. military outside the United States. The changes come after political and economic fights in Washington under waning days of Republican congressional control and with a jump in outsourced quasi-military work in Iraq to private security contractors.
LONDON - British Defense Minister Des Browne has acknowledged that operational pressure on the Royal Air Force (RAF) has meant the service's performance against a key personnel guideline has worsened over the past 12 months. While the army's figures have improved over the previous year and the navy's "remained steady," Browne told the British Parliament last week that the figure had deteriorated for the RAF. According to the British Secretary of State for Defense, "6.7 percent [of RAF personnel are] breaching harmony compared with 2.9 percent a year ago."
Poland receives more military assistance from the U.S. than any other European nation, according to the Defense Department, and Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich began two days of talks with Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon Jan. 15. U.S. plans to place ballistic missile interceptors in Poland took up the bulk of the conversation, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. He called the talks "frank but productive."
NEXT STEP: NASA is looking for a few good lunar lander ideas. A formal "broad area announcement" issued Jan. 11 seeks concepts from industry and the science community on the agency's planned "Altair" lunar surface access module, which will carry as many as four astronauts to the moon's surface as early as 2020.
The top officer commanding U.S. air forces in Iraq says he's "not concerned" about the Pentagon's proposal to send precision guided munitions, including penetrators, to Saudi Arabia. But his comments came as a bevy of legislators on Capitol Hill announced their opposition to the deal, raising expectations that the Democratic-led Congress could block the Bush administration's move.
LOCKHEED BEAMS: Lockheed Martin says it successfully demonstrated digital beamforming (DBF) capability to locate and track live targets with its Scalable Solid-State S-band Radar (S4R) engineering development model. DBF is an advanced approach to phased-array antenna pattern control. Lockheed says the capability has a number of advantages over conventional analog beamforming techniques.,
French armaments agency DGA has contracted with Thales and Sabca of Belgium to perform a partial avionics modernization on 20 Alphajets operated by France's advanced fighter training school. The first of the modernized Alphajets is supposed to be ready by mid-2009. The upgrade is intended to enable pilots at the school, which serves the French and Belgian air forces, to transition more easily to the front-line fighters such as the Rafale until Europe can agree on a new advanced trainer.
CORPORATE REALIGNMENT: Northrop Grumman announced Jan. 14 a strategic realignment of its two shipbuilding sectors and its missile business, along with the promotion of two internal candidates to lead the new divisions. Newport News and Ship Systems will be realigned into a single sector called Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, effective Jan. 28, with C. Michael Petters at the helm. Northrop's missile business will move from the Mission Systems sector to the Space Technology Sector on July 1.
PARIS - European Space Agency (ESA) head Jean-Jacques Dordain says the agency is talking with China about using the Shenzhou capsule to carry its microgravity experiments. Europe already uses Russian Foton capsules, but even the arrival of ESA's Columbus orbital facility, expected to be launched to the International Space Station on Feb. 7, will not be sufficient to meet demand, scientists say.
As the U.S. Air Force tanker battle enters what competitor Northrop Grumman calls the "last 30 days," the lead company executive for the program says the service's handling of the selection thus far would make it difficult to lodge a protest. But Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems Air Mobility Systems Vice President Paul Meyer also said that the competitors have to be prepared for the possibility. Calling the program selection board "thorough," Meyer said, "We have been given full access and insight."
